Headscratchers / Lethal Weapon (1987)

• How did Murtaugh know where to find General McAllister at the end? It looked like he just wandered into the right alley.
  • It was the alley outside the club McAllister held them hostage. Murtaugh was looking for him but it was a lucky coincidence that he fled at that point, at that time.
• At the end, Mr. Joshua drives up to Murtaugh's house to get revenge. As he does so, he kills two police officers who were sitting outside watching Murtaugh's house. When Mr. Joshua goes inside, he sees a note that reveals Murtaugh and Riggs were expecting him at the house. So....why the hell didn't they warn those two patrolmen sitting in their car??
  • Isn't that the reason the patrolmen were there?
  • Considering Joshua was less direct and more circumspect, they were probably expecting him to sneak into the house. In addition, if he didn't see police out front, he would have realized something was up. No one likely expected him to walk up to two armed police officers and kill them.

• What happened to the big shipment of heroin that McAllister was expecting during the first movie? The people who were going to pick it up are all dead, but depending on how it was coming in, it might not have been possible for the delivery men to turn around and take it back to Asia.
  • They probably would have notified Customs or had other LAPD officers do a search and seizure. It's safe to assume that heroin didn't make it to the streets, given the fact that they took out the entire distribution network.
    • But they don't know anything about the shipment that was coming in other than the fact that it's due in the next few days. They don't know who's delivering it, how it's being delivered, or where it's coming in.
  • McAllister is dead, but his files and records aren't; for a drug operation that large there has to be some kind of paper trail, and doubtlessly the police will be going through them with a fine-toothed comb. The police are also presumably going to watch the docks closely for any suspicious cargos or persons coming in around about the time that the shipment was expected. The smugglers on the boat (who are presumably unaware that the network they're relying on to pick up the drugs has completely fallen apart underneath them) are now going to be holding onto a large quantity of drugs that are now not going to be picked up by anyone and are going to have to get rid of them somehow without having any replacement networks in place. This will most likely make them stand out a lot more as they put out feelers to get new contacts, act more suspiciously than they otherwise would have had the network been running smoothly, and so on.

• What was the point of all the torturing and hostage-taking? Those sorts of things are for when someone has something you want but don't have. Not for finding out how much they know. They clearly weren't going to believe Murtaugh and Riggs if they said anything less than explaining the entire plan in full detail, so why don't they just assume they know everything and move on? It's the only answer they're prepared to accept anyway, and it's pretty commmon-sense.
  • Joshua's a sadist, so the interrogation and kidnapping is mostly just a pretext for some Cold-Blooded Torture and revenge against the heroes.
  • Remember also that the bad guys are all Special Forces veterans of The Vietnam War. They quite likely learned their torture methodology during that time frame.
  • They also don't just want to know what they know; they also want to know what, if anything, they may have told others. If it's just two cops who bumbled into their operation, fine, they can just be killed, no harm done. If it's two cops who've bumbled into their operation who have then gone on to tell other cops, then that's the entire operation potentially at risk.

• Look closely at the shot after Hunsacker's daughter crashed onto the car below her apartment. There are shadows of passersby being cast on the car, but they aren't rushing over in concern to see what the hell happened to this poor girl. They appear to be merely strolling by without a care in the world. Why? Don't tell me that 1987 LA is that apathetic.
  • Given that they're, well, shadows, they could be doing anything. They could be rushing to the nearest payphone to call for help. Though in a Doylist sense, it's possible that they're crewmembers working on the scene whose shadows happened to get picked up by the camera, making it a production error.